'Porn intensely focuses our mental and physical attention, uncovering specific emotions eroticized much earlier in life. Through our sexual fantasies, we attempt to master feelings of powerlessness, shame, guilt, fear and loneliness that have followed us into adulthood. Suppose our parents, teachers, or clergy used excessive shame or guilt to teach or control us. To deal with our resultant anger, we encode the shame in our fantasies, becoming aroused when thinking of ourselves as naughty or engaging in secret or forbidden sexual acts. We feel excited, for example, when punished or disciplined for supposed misbehavior, by being tied up and forced to have sex. Forced to surrender sexually to a dominant aggressor, we allow ourselves to enjoy the sex while escaping from the guilt that has haunted us through life. On the other hand, some of us respond to underlying guilt and shame by sexualizing the idea of becoming the aggressor, perhaps delving into themes of incest or other extreme sexual behaviors to attach pleasure to unthinkable acts. Eroticizing feelings of inadequacy lead to fantasies with themes involving submission, humiliation, verbal abuse or extreme adoration of a partner. We are aroused by being treated as if we are useless, unworthy or weak. Yet, by inviting our own humiliation, we become in charge of it and through the sexual pleasure we receive weaken the impact of childhood pain. Some of us on the the other hand, counteract feelings of inadequacy with ideas of grandiosity in which we imagine ourselves as important, powerful or irresistibly sexy. We invent fantasies in which we are admired, adored, paid for sex, recreating ourselves as competent, powerful and attainable.'

'A radical theory about the origins, power and popularity of Harry Potter versus Star Wars versus Lord of the Rings.' -- "If you cannot leave an abusive relationship – or you will not leave an abusive relationship – you will leave reality."

'Shrugging off the burdens of your history...' -- "Our tendency when we're abused is to look at it as though it's personal: *I* was abused. But the fundamental thing about abuse is that it is anti-empathetic. You cannot abuse someone that you are empathizing with. ...abuse is never, ever, personal. It has nothing to do with *us* as individuals. Once we detach the personal from [abuse] there's a certain amount of relief because what we're describing is an unhappy accident. [Personalization] is what children cling to because if it's not personal then we're completely invisible – and children can't psychologically survive that. ...it seems like a universal survival tactic of children is to take it personally; it's the only way to create a bond when you're being [abused]. The defense mechanism that kicks in is: if I can take it personally, I can pretend to have control. We take it personally as a way of avoiding hopelessness, helplessness and catastrophic depression... "

'"My whole life I've made a concerted effort to give people a fair shake and understand different points of view because I felt that everyone had something valuable to offer, but it turns out most of what they had to offer was complete bullshit." "Seriously," Richman added, "what have I gained from treating everyone's opinion with respect? Nothing. Absolutely nothing."' By his estimates, Richman's receptiveness has resulted in 160 irreplaceable hours of listening to grossly uninformed political opinions, 300 hours of carefully hearing out both sides of pointless arguments, and at least a month of listening to his parents' bullshit about how important it is to be open-minded.'

'Revelation of the Method concerns mind control in the last stages and at a high level. When you tell someone what you are doing to them - murder, mayhem, kidnap, rape, you name it - and they do nothing to stop you or protect themselves, you have created a doubly enslaved subject.' -- How many fingers, Winston?

"If you unconsciously resent the unjust and exploitative authority of your parents, and you project that onto the capitalist, you will not escape brutal authority – in fact, you will only intensify it. And that intensification takes the form of the State. If you are a slave, you can't escape. Involuntaryism leads to vengeance, to anger, to rage, to fantasies of destruction. Where we are not free to choose we become slaves to hatred. If you are not free to choose your companions then displacement, distortions, rippled subterfuges in rational thought, abandonment of empiricism, retreat into rank delusion – is inevitable. Because everything that you will believe when you don't have choice will be a mask for that lack of choice ... a mask to justify abandoning choice. If you fundamentally reject choice, you cannot have as your ideal a voluntary system. If you reject voluntaryism in your personal relations, you cannot sustain voluntaryism as an ideal in your ideology."

'The mindset of the middle class is off-putting—to the heterodox, to the sovereign, and to the individualist. The mindset is a dull recital on the virtues of moderation and proscription: don't stay up too late; don't drink too much; don't exercise too hard; don't risk too much; don't challenge authority; don't question orthodoxy. Democracy is particularly appealing to the middle class because it appeals to a faux sense of empowerment. The middle class is the human equivalent of an animal herd, because it never learns the concepts of unintended consequences, moral hazards, and opportunity costs. Such concepts are never taught, for obvious reasons, in its government-run education system. That the middle class pretends to understand the concepts of freedom and liberty makes it even more contemptible. Threaten the middle class's government-sponsored rice bowl with the specifics of liberty and it reflexively reacts with the brand of opprobrium: radical.'

"People become relativists because they're raised by a crazed absolutist: somebody who is an absolutist but completely irrational like a fundamentalist Christian, or a Nationalist, or somebody who is culturally prejudiced in some fundamental way. They're crazy AND they're absolutist. And there's no possibility of overturning crazy absolutism [because an irrational absolutist can't rationally differentiate a true absolute from a false one], so the only room that the child can find in that kind of mental environment is to say everything is relative. You can't oppose the crazy absolutism with rational absolutism [because having denied rationality, an irrational absolutist can only resolve disputes using violence, and you're just a small child], so you just retreat into a general fog hoping to hide from the irrational dogmas raining down on you. Relativism is an emotional defence mechanism that results from the imposition of irrational absolutes like religion, culture, statism and so on."

'...the comic's style of relating to people may partly mirror their early adventures with their mother. ...he or she becomes an expert in "reading" his or her mother, and then later learns how to "scan the world in a very sensitive way, looking for contradictions to decode and reconcile, hunting out cues as to how to win approval and support." ...comedians are obsessed with instability. ...this focus on inconstancy may represent an effort at mastery, and that the comedian seeks to adapt to a threat that was of painful intensity in their early childhood. The comics tended to have lower self-esteems and to say bad things about themselves. ...the comedian's focus on his or her smallness may be a result of the reduced significance he or she felt as a child and that much comic behavior is aimed at reducing the discrepancy of smallness between themselves and others. ...they viewed themselves as healers. ...uncovering truths that many people usually try to banish from awareness.'

'Dissociation can be a response to trauma or drugs and perhaps allows the mind to distance itself from experiences that are too much for the psyche to process at that time. Symptoms of dissociation resulting from trauma may include depersonalization, psychological numbing, disengagement, or amnesia regarding the events of the abuse. It has been hypothesized that dissociation may provide a temporarily effective defense mechanism in cases of severe trauma; however, in the long term, dissociation is associated with decreased psychological functioning and adjustment. Other symptoms sometimes found along with dissociation in victims of traumatic abuse (often referred to as "sequelae to abuse") include anxiety, PTSD, low self-esteem, somatization, depression, chronic pain, interpersonal dysfunction, substance abuse, self-mutilation and suicidal ideation or actions. These symptoms may lead the victim to erroneously present the symptoms as the source of the problem.'

'Christ is, of course, the main Suffering Victim Alter who has been sent to earth by God to display his wounds and ask for pity on behalf of mankind. ...the masochistic personalities of early Christians put sin at the center of life and built up a church of expiation and confession that for the first time allowed pardon for the sins. But the Christian, like the abandoning mode child, then totally absolved the Mother/God of all blame by a simple trick, saying: "I am all to blame. I deserve the torture. Mommy/God will pity me if I torture myself." Christian masochism ritualized the absolution/penance ritual to assure adherents that when they felt unloved they could go to a church, relive Christ’s agonies, confess their sins, carry out penances and assure their Mommy/God that they still worshipped Her and that it was really the child’s/worshipper’s fault that Mommy/God was so unhappy.'

'As mothers moved from infanticidal to abandoning mode child-rearing, early Christians could internalize a mommy who doesn’t actually kill her children but only abandons them, both through emotional abandonment and through sending them to wetnurses, fosterage, monasteries, service with others, etc. Even profound neglect is less devastating than watching your baby sister be strangled, so early Christians could for the first time in history hope to get their mother’s/God’s love (redemption) if they show her their pain and get her pity. This display of pain to get the love of the mother is known as the masochistic personality, a lower level borderline condition, which for the first time in history enables people to imagine that if they debase and torture themselves, the mother/God will feel sorry for them and might provide salvation, eventual closeness, rather than just helplessness and unbearable loneliness.'

'The result of always being subject to infanticidal, incestuous abandoning maternal memories is that schizoid tribal personalities cannot tolerate separation or rejection in their daily life. "Rejection is unendurable … families cluster together in an encampment ‘often touching against their neighbors’ [because] separation and loneliness are unendurable to them. [They] cannot bear the sense of rejection that even mild disapproval makes them feel." What is misnamed "egalitarianism" is really mistrust and fear of being called "selfish" for owning. Hoarding and self-aggrandizement are simply not tolerated—people were often killed for trying to keep more than their share of goods—ambition was stopped by overwhelming schizoid envy, change was feared and the surpluses and savings which were necessary for future innovation were nowhere to be found. In tribal societies "the mother is an eternal threat to self-individuation, a frustrater of urges, and a swallower of emergent identity" of men.'

'...dissociation into traumatized alters occurs more in [large] groups because one feels more helpless and more depersonalized, particularly in the largest groups, nations, and therefore more fearful. When we think of acting in society or even [speaking] in front of a large group, one feels more open to attack, to humiliation, and one can more easily switch into the traumatized hemisphere. Our first line of defense when in a social trance is to cling to a "strong" leader or a "strong" subgroup, merge our alters with them and join in various group activities, often violent ones, to defend ourselves. Thus it makes sense that the inevitable characteristics of a group [are] invincibility, grandiosity, irresponsibility, impulsiveness, suggestibility and fearfulness, all qualities of the neglectful and traumatic figures stored in our social alters. Without the laterality of the brain, neither politics nor religion can exist, as they do not in other animals who do not have divided selves.'

'If we grow, we will never be what Mommy or Daddy wants us to be, and we will never get their love.” Entire societies react to innovative, progressive historical phases by defending against the loss of parental approval. They move toward war through seven phases [of a building war trance], first splitting off both the Bad Motherland and their Bad Self and projecting them into “enemies,” who are then killed, sacrificed, because they have fused with an all-powerful Killer Motherland. #1 FREEDOM: Increasing independence, innovations, growth of real self #2 FEAR: Growth panic, loss of parental approval, disintegration of real self #3 FISSION: Splitting into “in-group” and “out-group” #4 FUSION: Merging with powerful punishing Killer Motherland #5 FRACTURE: Projection of Bad Self into helpless victim “enemy” #6 FAKED PROVOCATION: Faking a provocative attack by an “enemy” #7 FIGHT: Becoming the “Hero” of the Killer Motherland and being sacrificed for Her while killing the Bad Self “enemy”'

"Parental/sibling trauma has to go somewhere. The more it goes into the state, the less it needs to go into religion, which is why marxists were virulently anti-capitalist, anti-corporatist, anti-democratic/existing quasi- monarchical governments within Europe in the 19th century. They had given up on God and therefore all of their projections [went] out of God and into the state/corporations – which is why marxists are so virulently anti-capitalist, because the capitalist is the elder sibling and the state is the parent. That's why they focus so much of their rage onto the capitalist because the capitalist is the intermediate power, [the elder sibling who has] more power than the worker [(the younger siblings)] but less power than the state. But they can't focus on the evils of the state because if they focus on the evils of the state, they have no solution because their solution is an ultimate state."

"On the other hand, you would then assume that people who were not religious but also drawn to the same [family abuse] paradigm... that because they don't have God or Satan to project their family/sibling abuses into, they would be far more ferocious about the existing state and existing corporations. So if you're an atheist or agnostic or skeptic or rationalist or non-fundamentalist – then you don't have the big bag of God – therefore your projections have to go somewhere else. Which explains why the more secular, humanistic/left-wing/marxist cadres within society tend to be so virulently anti-corporate and anti- existing state." -- Continues...

"So the more religious [people] are, the more they will tend to be free-market and less afraid of corporations because corporations don't have the projection of sibling abuse... However, Satan and God has all the projections. In the same way, to some degree, it would explain why more religious people tend to be less statist because – in the modern world, the modern libertarian paradigm – they have God into which they place all of their parental projections and therefore they can look upon the state as a thing itself rather than a big bag of emotional projection. So [religious people] can criticize the state because they're not unconsciously criticizing their parents. But if you criticize God, they get very angry and offended because then you are criticizing their parents. If you say God is not virtuous, they hear: my parents are not virtuous on an unconscious level. But because they don't project that onto the state, they can criticize the state very heavily."

"All unprocessed trauma must find a route somewhere, and if it does not find it's route in the truth, then it will find its route in mythology: the mythology of nationalism, of racism, of collectivism, of religion, of superstition, and so on. If trauma is not processed it will find substitutes in mythology. If that is the case – and sibling abuse is the last great unprocessed trauma of society – then this theory is able to explain some interesting set of phenomenon that occur within the realm of libertarianism -to- marxism. -- So Satan is a stand-in for the elder sibling; God is a stand-in for the parent. Corporations are a stand-in for the elder sibling; the state is a stand-in for parents. If that is true then we would expect... that those who are more religious would tend to be less critical of corporations. Why? Because they have the big receptacle, the big black bag of Satan to project all of their sibling trauma into." -- Continues...

"The temptation is to blame the younger sibling as if everything is equal. In this way, the republicans blame the poor for being poor; blame the blacks for being in ghettos; blame women for making less money; and so on. And then the younger siblings say they need the state to protect them from rapacious corporations and polluters and so on – when, of course, the government produces the corporations and polices and regulates them already – so if corporations are doing evil and the government is far more powerful than the corporations and regulates the corporations, then clearly it is not the corporations that are at fault – it is the government that is at fault since it has all the power. But it's far easier to blame the elder siblings and excuse the parents than it is to place the blame for evil within the family where it properly belongs, which is with the parents."

"And we see this repeated over and over in human thought. So when things go bad for government, the statists blame the corporations or they blame the party in power – they can never blame the [state (the parents), or the] principle of coercion which is the foundation of statism. And when things go bad in the world, religious people can't blame God because that would be to question virtue of God and foundation of their propaganda. [So they] invent someone else to blame, and in religion it's all sibling blame. So the elder sibling is Satan and the younger sibling is humanity. Blame the victim is absolutely essential for destructive families and for statism and religion. -- And what about the elder siblings? Certain punitive forms of libertarianism or republicanism which blame the victim are the elder sibling's and/or parent's response to the vulnerability of the younger siblings when they are hurt, ([usually] as a result of the actions of the parent or elder sibling)." -- Continues...

"...given that infanticide was so common throughout history, children who displeased their parents would very often be abandoned or killed. This is why the taboo has remained so powerful into the modern world. Questioning the virtue of parents arouses live and death anxiety for a lot of people. When you have a fantasy of virtue in a situation of evil, the only way that you can maintain the fantasy of virtue is for there to be a stand-in which explains the evil. So in general, whenever you have an absolute power, a non-power, and an intermediate power; parents, younger siblings, elder siblings – the youngest sibling, in order to preserve the illusion of the virtue of the parents, is going to pretend that the evil he's experiencing is coming from the middle power, the elder sibling, and that he must appeal to the parent in order to protect himself... But the reality is that the parents create the abuses of the elder sibling by being abusive themselves. And this is why it doesn't work."

"One of the things that is very strong and powerful within the story is the degree to which the moral responsibility of God for Satan is evaded and avoided. It is the unexamined and unacknowledged pathology within the parent that creates the pathology of the child. If the parent is all-powerful, then the parent is completely responsible for the abuses of the elder siblings because the power of the parents could prevent that. But, of course, it is the very power of the parents that creates the abuses of the elder sibling because it is the unjust exercise of power over the elder sibling that trickles down to the abuse of the younger sibling. Parents unjustly claim omnipotence and all-power and claim they are in complete control of the family... but then when children rebel or act badly, the children are blamed completely. So parents claim all the power in the world when it suits them, and then take no responsibility when the children act badly. This is exactly the story of Lucifer."

"So for that to be the case then Lucifer would have to be angry at God but unable to vent his anger on God, and therefore must take it out against the stand-in for the younger siblings in this religious model: humanity. Satan was angry at God and God cast Satan down into Hell, and Satan knew that he couldn't fight against God because God was all powerful. And so God cannot be punished and therefore the children of God i.e., the younger siblings, must be punished: must be tempted, must be teased, must be tortured, must be brutalized, must be brought into the hell of Satan. If you are a cruel elder sibling, what you want to do is to use verbal abuse to break down and destroy the personality and self-esteem and security and happiness and self-efficacy of the younger siblings. Verbal abuse relies on the sanction of the victim: you have to accept the words in order for the abuse to stick. Satan is, in essence, a verbal abuser. Like vampires, he has to be invited in in order to do any evil."

"In family we have: parent, younger siblings and elder siblings. And in the state we have: government, citizens and corporations. So how does this model fit with religion? God is the parent, in particular, the father and the Virgin Mary is the child's conception of a mother because children don't know anything about sex and can't conceive of their mother having sex. So God's are the parents. And humanity is, of course, the younger siblings. So who are the elder siblings? The abusive elder sibling in religion is the Devil. Elder siblings, from the perspective of younger siblings, are produced by the Gods/parents. Lucifer was created by God as a lesser, independent being. Abuse against a younger sibling is the result of unactionable rage against the parent: You feel humiliated by the parent but you cannot act against them because the parent is too strong, therefore you must take your rage out on the innocent, younger sibling."

"Our feeling towards our parents get translated into our feelings towards the state. And our feelings towards our siblings get translated into our feelings towards corporations. Clearly people understand that corporations have less power than governments... but corporations affect them more negatively and directly. [The same is true of siblings]: Elder siblings have less power than parents but their negative behaviour affects younger siblings more immediately and consistently. People won't process the degree to which parents are complicit in sibling abuse. So why would people go to the government to protect them from corporations? Because the government says that its main purpose is to protect them from corporations, just as parents say [they will] protect them from their siblings. When you say you want to get rid of the state, what most people hear is that they're going to be left at the mercy of their elder sibling and mom and dad won't do anything to control his/her behaviour."

"You can't have any more empathy and love for yourself than you can have for the weakest around you." -- "Everyone is always talking about their family when they're talking about politics." -- "The reason that you would need to be addicted to the pathetic and destructive rush that comes from literally stealing candy from the hands of babes is that you have learned from somewhere that power is composed of two things: #1. An ugly grab and #2. A triumphant moralizing." -- "Whenever you are cruel to those around you, you raise a need for a state in their mind especially when they're helpless." -- "The primary reason for sadism is that it is an attempt to overpower and master feelings of intense helplessness... If you will not accept those feelings of helplessness and agony of being brutalized by power, then you must normalize the brutalization of that power: you project your own helplessness onto other people and then you torture it because the only other possibility is that you feel it."

Sibling abuse manifesting in culture as a hatred of corporations (siblings) and the belief that the "government" (parents) can save them when "government" (parents) is so obviously the enabler. (But who could face the pain of that?)

'The scientific evidence underlying the near-universal resistance to reason and evidence. If you want to change the world, you first must understand the unconscious barriers to thinking.' -- '"None of the circuits involved in conscious reasoning were particularly engaged," Western said. "Essentially, it appears as if partisans twirl the cognitive kaledoscope until they get the conclusions they want, and then get massively enforced for it, with the elimination of negative emotional states and activation of positive ones."

'Clearly the fact that some people are sensitive to the suffering of others proves that the destructive urge is not a universal aspect of human nature. So why do some tend to solve their problems by violence while others don't? After studying the matter for years, it seems clear to me that information about abuse inflicted during childhood is recorded in our body cells as a sort of memory, linked to repressed anxiety. If, lacking the aid of an enlightened witness, these memories fail to break through to consciousness, they often compel the person to violent acts that reproduce the abuse suffered in childhood, which was repressed in order to survive. The aim is to avoid the fear of powerlessness before a cruel adult. This fear can be eluded momentarily by creating situations in which one plays the active role, the role of the powerful, towards a powerless person. ...the offense is ceaselessly repeated. A steady stream of new victims must be found...'